Move Club #2: Brick The Official Plot Summary In a modern-day Southern California neighborhood and high school, student Brendan Frye's piercing intelligence spares no one. He's not afraid to back up his words with actions, and knows all the angles; yet he prefers to stay an outsider, and does - until the day that his ex-girlfriend, Emily, reaches out to him unexpectedly and then vanishes. His feelings for her still run deep; so much so, that he becomes consumed with finding his troubled inamorata. To find her, he enlists the aid of his only true peer, the Brain, while keeping the assistant vice principal only occasionally informed of what quickly becomes a dangerous investigation. Brendan's single-minded unearthing of students' secrets thrusts him headlong into the colliding social orbits of rich-girl sophisticate Laura, intimidating Tugger, substance-abusing Dode, seductive Kara, jock Brad and - most ominously - non-student the Pin. Only by gaining acceptance into the Pin's closely guarded inner circle of crime and punishment that Brendan will be able to uncover hard truths about himself, Emily and the suspects that he is getting closer to. nixon's take: It's the first feature film by director Rian Johnson (he did last years Looper), starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lucas Haas and Nora Zehetner. Basically a murder mystery at it's core, it's got the loner hero getting in over his head and the taking chances all for a woman he loved who was murdered. Almost noir in it's tone, but set with high school age characters, who seemingly never actually attend class. Ever. It kept on popping up in my "Netflix Think's You'll Like These Movies" list every time I'd go in to watch something, so I knew I had to see what the algorithm had in store for me. I enjoyed it quite a bit and am happy to share it with the rest of BF. Available on: Netflix Amazon Instant DVD/Blu-Ray
Holy shit - a movie I've seen. Worth noting - the pitch here is that this is done in the style of an old noir joint. Not almost - completely. Meaning that the dialog delivery and pacing and story beats are exactly calibrated to that. So if you've watched....I dunno, Double Indemnity and found it incomprehensible, you might have a problem here. I quite enjoyed it when I saw it, myself. Not sure I can remember quite enough to provide more information than I just did, but I do remember enjoying it quite a bit.
Damnit, not available on Netflix in Canada, I'm 99% sure it used to be, guess the time ran out on this. I'll have to figure out some other way of watching this.
I loved the heck out of Brick. It's one thing to have the precious idea of anachronistically doing a noir inside a modern high school setting - if there was ever an idea that screamed "first year film student", it's that one - but it's quite another to pull it off. Johnson makes the interesting choice to not shoot the movie in a noir style (visually, it's closer to something like River's Edge), which you would think would make the noir dialogue (and clever costuming) more jarring. Instead, it underscores how surprisingly easy it is to map the stereotypical noir world of thugs, criminals and femme fatales to the high school ecosystem. Of course, having a tremendous lead performance by Joseph Gordon Levitt helps. In fact, all the actors are good with the exception of Nora Zehetner, who granted at least looks the part of a noir female character but is sadly out of her depth when it comes to the acting. That's a fairly minor problem, though. In a world of boring-ass cookie-cutter Sundance relationship movies masquerading for "independent cinema" in America, it's incredibly refreshing to see an independent movie like Brick take some real risks with both style and content. Great pick, nixon66.
I saw this and loved it when it came out. It's like a classy standalone episode of Veronica Mars, with extra-stylized dialogue.
Kevin Smith has Johnson on this week's Smodcast. The first half of the interview is about everything up until Looper, so it might be a good companion to this week's discussion. Fun fact from that interview: there had been a bunch of high school movies around that time, so there were a lot of young-looking 20 somethings who were famous in Hollywood when Brick was going into production who were looking for something good. Because of that, and his casting director, Johnson got a much more experienced cast than a first time director on an indie high school noir movie could normally hope for. And half the $450,000 budget for the movie was put up by his father and grandfather, who introduced him to movies. When they sold the film to Focus for $2 million, he could write them big fat checks. Happiest day of his life. BTW, what a great excuse to watch this again.
i loved this movie! this was the first one that showed me jgl could act. it is weird seeing all those famous people in an indie film. claire from lost, the persuasive voice girl from heroes(i don't think she wasn't famous then). once in a while i had trouble keeping up with the dialog. and i could never take the dinner party with the femme fatale seriously. the eaten line and the english teacher's description was my favorite quotes from the movie. the fistfight with the jock and the end of the chase with the knife guy were amusing as hell to me. i felt bad for the pin's mom, though. feel free to skip the other noir high school movie, assassination of a high school president. that one wasn't anything special.
I tried to watch this when it came out to massive acclaim. I love old noir flicks but this one did nothing for me. :( Maybe I should give it another try, but it's hard to make myself do that when I hated it so much the first time.
(re)WATCHED IT. Hadn't seen it since it came out, and it's quite a bit more fun to watch it the second time. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is just ridiculous, playing Brendon like a Chandler character caught in a Hammett novel. The only real issues I have with the movie are sometimes the sound mix makes the dialogue harder to hear than it should be and, like I said above, Nora Zehetner. She doesn't break the movie or anything, but she also never comes across as a person capable of the level of duplicity the script requires. Visually, though, it's actually quite a bit better than I remembered. The connection to River's Edge is still very strong, and like that movie Brick seems to inhabit secret places known only to teenagers - drainage sewers, empty lots, basements. It plays as an inversion of noir: where noirs traditionally deal in shadow and dense urban areas, Brick takes place in wide open spaces. The noir tropes and dialogue mesh up with this idea of the characters world living underneath the purview of adults, the way the criminal element does in a noir, only being noticed when they do something so wrong that adults are forced to notice. (To that end, there are hardly any adults in the movie at all, and seemingly no real authority.) Also, crucially, Brick doesn't ever wink at the audience. That's the thing I think that really sells it for me - if there was even the tiniest break in the noir conceit, the reality of the movie would shatter. It was a real treat to watch it again. Thanks for the pick, nixon66.
WATCHED IT I admire the attempt at high school noir but but ultimately it fails. The stylized dialogue suffered from poor sound/mumbling. Only JGL performed up the material and he sometimes raced through his lines. I think the director did indulge in some winking: The Pin's mom, The theater nerds as foot stools... Not dark enough to be Fargo not light enough to be Bugsy Malone
I don't think the scene with Pin's mom (which is hilarious) counts as winking. It serves a similar function to Brendon's scene with the assistant VP* to show how little attention are paid to the actions of the teenagers by the adult world (Or, in the Mom's case, perhaps just intense denial.) * I'm talking about Shaft! Can you dig it?
WATCHED IT For me this was also the first film I watched where I saw the talents of JGL. I remember I had to watch it twice in a row to understand it, even with subtitles. I mostely agree with madkevin, although I do think the scene with assistant VP Shaft is very appropriate for the noir trope (a private dick clashing with chief of police or something similar). The scene with Pin's mom didn't fit into anything like that, though it's also not an obvious or direct wink. I also thought that Nora Zehetner isn't right for the part, her delivery feels off which is very noticable next to JGL. This movie has one of my favourite scenes of all time, the chase scene. The tension is so high, and I don't often feel a physcial reaction to a movie but every time I watch this film my heartrate goes up at this particular scene, it's incredibly well done.
Oh, yeah, that scene completely fits in with noir cliche of having the private dick getting a tongue lashing from a higher authority as well. I should have made that more clear.
Yes that, but since you compared the scene with Pin's mom and this scene with each other I was more or less talking about that. Because where Shaft obviously fits in with the rest of the film, the Pin's mom feels kind of out of place. Not enough that it's an "We're breaking the trope, nudge nudge, wink wink", but still less appropriate than VP Shaft.
I remember being quite weirded out by this, up until the principal scene where it finally clicked, and I realised what the movie was.
WATCHED IT (again). I maintain that Nora Zehetner was cast because she looks like Mary Astor. I believe that hair clip in the last scene on the football field is right out of The Maltese Falcon. What's with Tug's head? Sometimes he has the blood dripping down, sometimes it seems to me like a birthmark, and in one scene he had bloodstains on his white cap. I was struck this time by all the birds around the Pin. I probably missed some too. There's a metal raven on his front mailbox. There's the stuffed raven next to him. There's the duck on his walking stick. There are bald eagles on his light fixtures in the basement. And when Dode gets what's coming to him ravens fly out of the tunnel. All the birds are black or metal. When Brendan goes to meet Laura on the football field, an entire flock of white birds (seagulls?) fly up. The evil has been purged, y'know? It's almost a John Woo film. The only real weirdness with the adults was in the big meet, which was supposed to be at 4am. The Pin's mom is serving milk to both the crews. I was fine with her being clueless when it was Brendan, Pin, and Tug, but c'mon, Mom. It's 4am and your house is crawling with thugs in black suits and other thugs in white t-shirts, and you're serving them milk? Also I remember when this came out a lot of my students didn't like it because Brendan was "the emo poster boy." He was the definition of emo back then, and the backlash against emo was in full swing. In watching it this time, I thought that if Brendan is emo, then every hard boiled dick ever was just a big emo baby.
WATCHED IT This was a mixed bag for me. The noir style, story and performances were decent for the most part. One thing I just couldn't get past was the high school setting and the jarring and forced moments with adults that struck me as the director screaming at me "THESE ARE JUST KIDS DOING CRAZY GROWN UP SHIT, DOESN'T THAT MAKE THIS SO HIP AND SMART OR SOMETHING??" and "LOOK AT HOW THAT ADULT PATS HIM ON THE HEAD AS SHE GIVES HIM APPLE JUICE!!" The only scene with an adult that worked at all for me was the vice principal. I think mostly because he didn't interact with Brendan as if he were a child but more as someone he respected and treated as someone who's capable. Also probably because he represents an actual character relevant to the plot. If this were done against a different backdrop he'd be the cop that our detective protagonist knows and deals with somewhat frequently when solving these cases. I think this either needed to more fully embrace the high school setting or just drop it and play the whole thing straight. As it is the high school angle just feels like some sort of tacked on marketing gimmick. Story wise I had a hard time accepting that Brendan had basically no reaction when he found out who killed Emily, we didn't even get a narration bit or anything, he just went on as if it was no big deal. I guess you could argue he had much more of it figured out by that point but the scene when he finds out is clearly set up to make both Brendan and the audience think that he's going to be accused of it and once we find out we get basically nothing. The random sickness that Brendan was suffering from also seemed far too convenient, a bit of weak writing there I think. I also had a hard time with Tug making the transition from the Pin's muscle to leader of his own gang, which we absolutely didn't even see until the very end.
I could be wrong here, but I interpreted that not as 'random sickness', but sickness that you get from being stomped in the gut multiple times by multiple people. I actually liked that, so often we see people in films just shrug serious injuries off, and here they made a serious effort to show that it most certainly does have an effect.
Maybe, it's just the how and when it affected him was simply too convenient, he was fine when the script needed him to be fine and impaired when the script needed him to be impaired. It was just a device used to create drama when the writer couldn't figure out another way of handling it.
Obviously, your opinions are you own, but I completely disagree with this. The cleverness of the high school angle is how easy it is to map noir to the environment of a high school. Classic noir is deeply concerned with social power structures (or, in the case of Chinatown, literal power structures), a theme you can trace all the way back to Fritz Lang's 1931 masterpiece M, which was a huge influence on the American noir cycle. The protagonist of a noir is usually a guy who stands just on the outside of these structures (that's why private dicks are such a staple - they're not quite police, and not quite thugs), able to move within the different circles while never really being a part of any of them. Right there, it's easy to see how the high school setting plays on that theme. Brendan is established as once being part of a more popular circle, but he's ostracized himself. He's known to people, but removed from them. Now, maybe that says more about my own high school experience than anything, but that is a very relatable part of being a teenager. The different circles map to different cliques - jocks, rich kids, druggies, theater drama queens, nerds like Brain.
Sure, it maps but the movie doesn't play on that to any significant degree. The vast majority of the time the fact that these are high school kids is irrelevant and most of the time they're doing things that high school kids simply don't do. As I said it either needed to embrace it more or drop it. Right now it's just sort of there with no real purpose other than to occasionally clobber the viewer with the fact. It could easily drop the high school part, say the characters are in the early twenties and have several of them live in the same apartment complex and you'd hardly have to change the script at all. I'd also have a much easier time believing the events and actions are those of twenty somethings rather 16 and 17 year olds. Most of the time I forgot they were teens, only to have it unnecessarily bludgeoned over my head and ruin any suspension of disbelief. I'll grant that the movie was good enough to make me forget again and keep me interested but it did this in spite the high school setting. I'm probably coming off as more negative, overall I enjoyed the movie it was just that every time I was reminded of the age and setting surrounding the characters I had to work to get over it again.
WATCHED IT I liked it. This sums up how I feel about the movie pretty well. I enjoyed it, and having seen it I'm satisfied with it, but while watching it there were times that I felt pulled entirely out of the film and reminded that it was being oh so clever by doing the high school/noir mashup, but then it would go back to being good and I'd settle back into the story. I'll probably watch it again some time.
Yeah, I think the movie would've been just as engrossing without the High school setting, even with the same actors, considering none of them look like actual high schoolers.
WATCHED IT Enjoyed this. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was obviously the best part of the film and most of the rest of the cast is good. I'd echo the thought that Nora Zehetner wasn't up to the task of being the femme fatale. She has the look but can't back it up. I was constantly surprised that Brendan would trust her at all. (Not that he really does) I haven't really watched all that much noir. Thankfully the dialogue never felt stilted - which is a credit to most of the actors. I'd echo the other comments made here that the high school setting wasn't all that great though. Besides the usage of the lockers as a message system and the brief (but excellent) interlude involving the Vice Principal it has no direct bearing on the story. Most of the characters also seem to exist outside of the high school setting. Absolutely none of them actually "take lunch" at the school; nor do they spend much actual time at the school. With regards to Gordon-Levitt they make sure to highlight his truancy. Whenever he is actually at school it is only a way to make him find a new clue to get away. The best part of the film is how Rian Johnson is able to frame shots. I believe the first shot we have of Brendan is that of his shoes and it is something which becomes a trend within the film. Several times there are long shots involving his shoes which culminate in the chase scene. That is probably the transitional scene where Gordon-Levitt's character "takes off his gumshoes" and goes in deep with the Pin. Doesn't hurt that it was a great sequence.
Glad many of you enjoyed the movie and got a chance to watch it again for many of you. My choices actually came down to a classic noir movie in Chinatown and then the high schoolish take of Brick. I went with the latter as I didn't think it as well known, but as usual Broken Forum surprises me and gives me the warm fuzzies. I'd agree that while the social structures of high school map well to the noir types they were going for, the movie didn't succeed in telling it's story well with believable teenaged kids. Which is fine. I still enjoyed the story they told a ton and look forward to watching this again in a while to enjoy it all over again.
(re)WATCHED IT a few nights back; had loved it the first time some years ago, and was happy to find out I still did now. (Some movies don't work out that way, which is always a sad thing.) As well as being really nicely shot, the sound design was usually effective too. There were the occasional bad moments of the mix making the dialogue hard to hear, a common enough crime in movie sound mixing (I'll never understand it), but especially a crime here. But then there were the scenes like that great foot chase, and everything coming to a violent head at the end, off-camera but heard from upstairs and off-camera in darkness, and the foley work was fantastic. I'm firmly in the camp that didn't mind the high school noir mashup in the slightest. The tropes mapped onto abstracted high school cliques well enough as well stated above. But also because I'm at peace with every movie, especially movies with teen characters, being stylized by nature. No one talks that smoothly, even in "realistic" non-noir approaches; no one's that cool or confident. But querying my inner teenage self, there wasn't a kid in the world who didn't wish that they did, who didn't see their own struggles and troubles as frought with terrific cool significance. I'm also in agreement with many others that the femme fatale didn't quite work, but she did her best, and didn't stick out too badly.
